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Kevin, as always, very interesting. Since Val d'Aosta used to be a part of Piemonte (I have absolutely no knowledge of its succession; anyone more informed, please jump in), is the food basically the same---just maybe a bit closer to Swiss home cooking (alps, etc., no anchovies) that far from the Savoy capital? More emphatic about the use of fontina since it's the recognized DOP source?

As for the leftover fonduta, have you made any attempts yet to reheat it? I once found the broad buckwheat noodles (D & D's, NYC) in Marcella Hazan's recipe for noodles, chard & potatoes with fontina and think it would be fun to try to make the pasta yourself.

A good SOLID mac & cheese gratin ?

P.S. You cite Waverly Root. Have you had a chance to check Anna Del Conte's translated Gastronomy of Italy?

Kevin, as always, very interesting. Since Val d'Aosta used to be a part of Piemonte (I have absolutely no knowledge of its succession; anyone more informed, please jump in), is the food basically the same---just maybe a bit closer to Swiss home cooking (alps, etc., no anchovies) that far from the Savoy capital? More emphatic about the use of fontina since it's the recognized DOP source?

My understanding of Val d'Aosta is that its geography and relative isolation has always made it a fairly autonomous region that even when it was attached to Piemonte was allowed more or less an independent reign. Somewhere along the line they must have just finalized it and granted it full "region-hood". And, from what I can discern from the scraps of information out there, it is indeed much more Swiss and alpine in nature than anything: lots of whole grain breads, cabbage, and game is a dominant meat.

As for the leftover fonduta, have you made any attempts yet to reheat it? I once found the broad buckwheat noodles (D & D's, NYC) in Marcella Hazan's recipe for noodles, chard & potatoes with fontina and think it would be fun to try to make the pasta yourself.

A good SOLID mac & cheese gratin ?

I've made that pasta dish (sounds similar to pizzoccheri, which uses savoy cabbage instead of chard) before and it was a hit. Very fragile noodle, though; they tore easily and just fell apart when I hung the sheets to dry before cutting them. I am thinking of some sort of pasta dish to use up what's left; though since I posted the meal I've used some on the morning eggs to great effect, and last night dipped into it for my dinner. I poured some on a leftover pepper sformato and, while Kramer says that fonduta often goes over sformati, I think this matching was the wrong choice. So actually now there's not all that much left. But I did, earlier, think of possibly tossing it with tagliatelle and baking it, so we're on the same wavelength!

P.S. You cite Waverly Root. Have you had a chance to check Anna Del Conte's translated Gastronomy of Italy?

I haven't. Christmas was very good to me this year, cookbook-wise, and I wrapped up all the regional books I had been aware of until you cited this one. I'll need to finish all of those before I'd want to move on.

Friday night’s meal was a combo of two polenta recipes in Matt Kramer’s Passion for Piedmont: polenta with baccala topped with “acciughe verde” sauce.

This was the last of the baccala fillets from Christmas and finally, I cooked it right. Not too firm still, not overly salty, nor was is flaccid and falling apart, either. It was a very simple condimento simmered with yellow onions and a touch of water.

To top the whole dish, acciughe verde, “green anchovies”, a sauce involving three of Piemonte's beloved flavors: anchovies, garlic, and vinegar, pulsed together with parsley. Stirring a little of that into the polenta created a new, unusual flavor.

It was served a little more al’onda than the Piemontese prefer their risotti. I’ve made a risotto with red wine before, but the wine itself was much less an element of the dish than it was here, where it constituted the bulk of the cooking liquid. The result was concentrated and intensely flavored risotto.

The secondo was pollo Marengo, braised chicken that is a favorite of both the Piemontese and its bordering area in France. This is the dish that Napoleon’s chef, according to folklore, scrounged up from the countryside after a decisive battle. Chicken is slowly braised with mushrooms and tomatoes (though supposedly the chef originally just fried the chicken), along with cognac and Madeira wine, then removed and set aside. Using the same pan, you sauté some bread in the drippings from the dish, then fry some eggs to top the bread, and finally finish with shrimp, standing in for freshwater prawns that were originally used.

My wife really enjoyed this one; there’s certainly a lot going on in the dish and different flavors to try together.

Saturday night was a sort of "greatest hits" dinner party for my wife's work friends. It was quite a challenge for me as I've gotten neurotically attached to to the definitely ordered meals of the past year: antipasto, primo, secondo, contorni. This one we wanted alot more casual, easy to eat kind of food. I still think I went too esoteric.

None of it was Piemontese; it skewed heavily Umbrian and Tuscan, including the ribs and this pasta rottolo. I also made baked ziti with grilled eggplant and bruschetta with three toppings: kale, beans and sundried tomatoes, and braised portabellos. I include this entry only to say that the pasta rottolo is normally topped with bechamel, and I augmented it with the leftover fonduta.

I did a double-take when I saw the eggs and shrimp since neither are included in Kramer's book; his recipe calls for Madeira, too, along with dried porcini, stock, parsley & garlic. That kind of excess does seem to be very much within the spirit of nineteenth-century France if later than 1800.

Pellegrini's recipe (published in 1891) calls simply for dry WHITE wine and stock, then a sprinkling of parsley and lemon juice.

None of the other cookbooks at home have recipes for this dish, though one of the first things I ever made from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of... was a veal stew Marengo with tomatoes, mushrooms, orange peel and white wine.

Anna del Conte dates the recipe precisely to June 14th & calls for the shrimp, if not the eggs. Her chicken is sauteed in butter, then cooked with white wine and mushrooms. River shrimp are boiled in red wine, then added to the plate with fried bread and parsely.

Explaining how the original recipe was gussied up over time, she notes that because the Austrians captured the provisions of Napoleon's army:

"It is therefore most unlikely that the chicken was surrounded by small puff-pastry shapes, or that tomatoes were added to the sauce, particularly as tomatoes were virtually unknown in Piedmont at the time. It seems probable that these two additions were made by Escoffier when he annotated the recipe." [In [i]Gastronomy of Italy[/i] (New York: 1987): 257.]

Many Italian online sources include both the eggs and shrimp, including those devoted exclusively to Piemonte.

To further bastardize an already bastardized and somewhat controversial dish (see Adam's link for an interesting thread from the cooking board), I combined the elements of Kramer's recipe with those found in Ada Boni's Italian Regional Cooking book, Culinaria:Italy, and Marlena di Blasi's Regional Foods of Northern Italy cookbook. All three of the latter are nearly identical, and do offer prawns/shrimp and eggs. The madeira and cognac comes from Kramer's book; the other three sources do indeed use white wine for the primary braise, then either finish it with lemon juice (Boni and Culinaria) or again, cognac (di Blasi).

Last week I tried the Valpellinentze soup from Val d’Aosta that Eden and NathanP attempted earlier this month on the Piemonte/Val d’Aosta thread. Both mentioned being worried about how well leftovers would hold up, and recalling not-too-fondly how long my bread soup lasted when I made it in Tuscany, I made essentially a cabbage soup separately with onion, butter, cinnamon, a huge head of cabbage, and four smoked pork shanks to flavor the dish. It was then just ladled over more of the whole grain bread I made earlier this month and topped with fontina. If I had ovenproof bowls, I most certainly would have broiled these to get a nice browned cheese topping:

So again, not so appealing looking. It’s not found everywhere, but a couple of recipes recommend adding red wine at the very end of cooking and I think it really livened up the dish’s long-cooked, muted flavors. In the time it took me to take pictures of the dish and then get it to the table, the bread had soaked up all the broth, so it actually had a similar effect to baking the whole thing as with the authentic recipes. And the bread's flavors, too, go very well with the soup and lent their sturdy, almost smokey flavors to the dish.

This weekend, I did a couple of blowout feasts to wrap up the whole project and celebrate the final meals.

Saturday night was a dinner party with work friends and I decided to mark the occasion with that dish which epitomizes both refined dining and comforting, familial feasting at once: bollito misto.

But, first, to start the meal, bagna cauda, the “hot bath” of olive oil, butter, anchovies, and garlic that you then dip the region’s famed grissini (breadsticks) and raw vegetables into.

(It was then served in little individual bowls, not out of that pot). Here again, note the favored flavors of the Piemontese worked into the dish: garlic and anchovies. And yes, if available, the whole is then blanketed with truffle shavings. I used Matt Kramer’s recipe for the most part as the basis of the recipe. Kramer advocates cooking the dish very slowly for an hour to really tame the rough garlic flavors and suffuse the butter and oil with the rich flavors. He also, as with the garlic soup, urges what I think is far too much garlic: one head per person! I went with a head and half for 6 people and it was plenty. As I have a gas burner and have troubles getting it to a low enough temp to not scorch the garlic, I instead put the pot in an oven on the “keep warm” setting: 160F. Having made this a couple times before, I find that all the butter and olive oil kind of weigh things down, even with garlic and anchovies in there to perk the dish up, so I add just a splash of vinegar to liven up the dish. Interestingly, Kramer gives a variation with red wine in his book, so maybe (well hopefully at least) I’m not so far off base with that flourish.

So there’s the grissini in the back (brutto, like Hathor’s!) then carrots, red pepper, and steamed cardoons. Most recipes call for them to be raw, but no way that would work with the big, fibrous monsters we get here. I gotta say, cardoons just aren’t doing it for me. I vastly prefer artichokes (my favorite vegetable, in fact); these just aren’t worth all the effort, and when cooked they have a somewhat unpleasant, limpid, vaguely metallic flavor, unlike the nutty sweetness of artichokes.

So, the bollito misto and primo. While bollito misto is considered at its best and most extravagant in Piemonte, I added some tweaks from Emilia-Romagna.

For the primo: angolotti in brodo.

I don’t think it’s traditional to serve them in a broth; maybe at the most you reduce a flavorful stock and sauce them, or even more typically, they are sauced with butter and sage. Mario Batali has said that some ristoranti in Piemonte only serve them in a kerchief, no sauce at all! These were obviously made shortly after Thanksgiving, back when I was doing Emilia-Romagna: the filling was leftover roasted capon and some of the roasted veal from earlier in that month, as well, along with either prosciutto or mortadella, and parmigiano. Okay, so, really, these aren’t even agnolotti; except that I did make the dough with only egg yolks. And the broth, obviously, is from the bollito.

My version of bollito misto, which has evolved over time to be some feast we make during the Holidays, leaves out the more exotic ingredients: calves’ head or tongue, though I was tempted on the latter given FoodMan and azereus’s successes with it this past month. Still, it would have been a tough sell on everyone at the party, my wife included. What does go into mine: beef (chuck steak this time; I find that beef is always the weakest player in the bollito), cotechino, pork spareribs that have been separately blanched to leach out some of their fat, and Cornish game hens. Normally, capon is called for in a bollito, but even my stockpot isn’t big enough to hold one of those monsters, and I’m not splurging for one just to boil it.

To accompany the meats: balsamic syrup and salsa verde, which I make with mustard, chives, mint, fennel fronds, vinegar, capers, and olive oil. Tastes outstanding with the game hens in particular.

This is a really, really good dish. Like the equally mythic ragu Bolognese, I first read about this in Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cookbook and it fascinated me from the start; her intro for the recipe goes on a couple of pages, and she quotes lavishly from “The Passionate Epicure” to make her point as to how far beyond the name of the dish the final product really goes. It’s fun to always introduce it by calling it “boiled meat” to guests and then watch them get won over after hearing such a plain title. The cotechino has, every time, been the standout hit of the meal and there’s always a tense moment when there’s only a couple slices left.

After the meal, a tart salad of bitter greens is a must to get the digestion going. I tossed fennel slices (a known digestive aid) and oranges in with radicchio and arugula and a balsamic vinaigrette.

Finally, inspired by the many great attempts at Hazelnut cake on the Piemonte thread, I gave it a spin myself, this one being the chocolate variation in Kramer’s book.

I used baking powder, though, instead of yeast which Kramer goes for. This wasn’t too dry, either, but the chocolate did dominate and wash out the hazelnut flavors. I had originally intended to serve it with zabaglione as posters have done on the other thread, but ran out of time and stovetop space.

Sunday night’s meal was a little celebration with my wife and I: seven years together. The items were not so much strictly Piemontese, but definitely inspired by the region.

We started with a gratin of the leftover peppers and cardoons from the previous night. I layered the vegetables with some leftover bagna cauda, then topped the whole with béchamel and baked for 20 minutes in a very hot oven.

The next was a “ravioloni” stuffed with blue cheese and topped with mostarda. To lighten up the pungent punch of the blue, I mixed in ricotta as well. There was also just a little bit of butter and broth cooked together to moisten the pasta.

Last was duck breast “martini style”, in a nod again to Piemonte being the home of vermouth. The duck breast was marinated overnight with white wine, ample juniper berries, and thyme, then seared, outside again on the cast iron skillet atop the burner attachment on my grill. A pan sauce was made with the strained marinade, a little broth, shallots, butter, and ample dry vermouth.

Here’s another region where I’ve really given the short end to desserts, and this time, it’s not for lack of recipes. We’re still living off of Christmas cookies!

I chose for this one not something so extravagant, but a perfect example of why I love Italian food, culture, and cooking so: pasta with leftovers. I saved a bit of the brassato and a bit of the lamb from earlier in the month in my freezer, reconstituted them a bit with white wine and broth, augmented them with peas, and tossed them with buttery tajarin noodles, then topped the whole with grated parmigiano. Suddenly, what would have been a mundane meal of leftovers for the third night in a row becomes wholly different. A new way to celebrate the same food again. And that’s what’s great about Italian food.

Most Fun month:Sicily. I was absolutely giddy when I started cooking from this region in July, and a number of times just found myself grinning widely while cooking as one new, exciting, enticing aroma after another filled my kitchen. Every dish and meal was an adventure; I got a chance to cook a lot of stuff I was always curious about and try a number of new and different flavors.Biggest Surprise:Liguria. I originally chose an abbreviated month, March (our trip to Italy took up the first half), to do Liguria since I originally figured I’d run out of things to cook. Instead, after reading Fred Plotkin’s Recipes From Paradise, I found myself with a whole bounty of dishes I never even got to get to. Very light, fragrant, and delicate: you can definitely see how the Mediterranean Cooking boom of the ‘90s had a number of influences from this region. It’s perfect spring and summer cooking and will definitely get added to my roster of go-to regions.Most unusual:Friuli Venezia-Giulia. About the furthest I’ve gone from Italian cooking that could still be called Italian. Horseradish, sauerkraut, baked ham in pastry crust, rye bread dumplings, plums, gulasch. . . . but yet no heavy-handedness, lots of delicate flavors and restraint running through each dish. Now that we’re back in the winter I find myself nostalgic for that month and wanting to start there all over again. Biggest Frustration:Tuscany. Nothing endemic to the region itself, just a mid-month run of bad luck caused me to botch a bunch of dishes that I’ve done before and know could’ve been standouts. It started and ended well enough, but in between I just kept screwing up. Biggest Disappointment:Abruzzo. I’ll own up to the fact that I probably didn’t give this region its full due since from mid-June on I was chomping at the bit to get to Sicily. Too, I messed up some of the key traditional dishes. And it was unseasonably hot, which really sapped the appetite for some of the more robust fare. Hathor very astutely pointed out once that so many of the simple, rural cuisines (Puglia, Abruzzo, Umbria) don’t travel well because they are so dependent on local ingredients. That said, there’s not much out there on this region, supposedly home to some of Italy’s best cooks, and by month’s end I was really scraping the bottom for things to cook.

With the bonus month and a number of double-headers, there wound up being only four regions left out. All four, to my observation, lack a depth of cooking literature on them (in the U.S., at least) other than the requisite chapter in regional treatments, which was a major consideration in their omission.

• Of the four, the one I most regret not getting to is Sardinia, which I could probably get a month out of by culling all my resources together. I even debated extending this thread by one more month still to get it in there, but then decided that was pushing it too far. Hopefully it will get a nod in this year’s threads. • Lombardia is home to a number of classic dishes in the Italian repertoire, and Waverly Root’s chapter on this region in Food of Italy is one of the best. Unfortunately, it has the misfortune of being surrounded by three other regions with towering cuisines of their own: Piemonte, the Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna. I'm glad to see that it's the next region up for February; however, I'll have to enjoy the region by proxy and see what everyone else does instead of cook it myself; we're kicking off the diet in earnest this coming month and I'm on sabbatical from the stove. • Trentino Alto-Adige probably could and should have been affixed to either the Veneto or Friuli’s cooking months, but both are such heavyweights in their own right that it would have been hard to make room. T-A-A is one of the last regions to have joined Italy and a couple of authors I’ve read, notably Marlena di Blasi, dismiss it at too Germanic or Austrian: in fact di Blasi leaves out of her Northern Italian cookbook entirely.• Molise, recently separated from Abruzzo, is practically nonexistent in the cooking literature I have. It gets a sidebar recipe in Culinaria: Italy (a ragu made with goat meat). Di Blasi again dismisses it in her Southern Italian cookbook, telling readers interested in the region to just cook something from the mountainous part of Campania for the best approximation. Root’s chapter on Abruzzo-Molise sticks only with Abruzzo and is woefully short still.

Here is the long-promised Bibliography of the preceding 13 months of cooking. I have tried to be as thorough and accurate as possible in recounting which resources were used, but there may have been some oversights and omissions. Fullest apologies if there are.

Thanks to everyone for the ongoing encouragement and discussions throughout the year. It was a lot of fun being able to share this with all of you, discuss variations on dishes, new ways to do it, new resources to search for. The thread wouldn’t have been even half what it was without your input and probably wouldn’t have made it as far without everyone sharing. The new thread, and the direction it appears to be taking, is a great extension of that and has far exceeded my expectations. Everyone’s doing a great job and I’m really looking forward to extending my stay and learning from you all!

Thanks to my wife for her patience and support (particularly while she sat at the table waiting for me to snap 10 different shots of the same dish!). Every meal I make is a tribute and inspiration to her; I can’t conceptualize a dish without imaging her expression when she tries it for the first time.

Thanks to Italy, for, well, being Italy: home to the most comforting, honest, inspiring, appetizing, welcoming food on Earth.